Click play on the video player above to watch my Google+ conversation with Harvard behavioral scientist and Slate’s Human Nature correspondent about the role of ritual in human life.

All over the world, people employ rituals. For millions, it’s as simple as making a cup of coffee the same way, every day. Books and movies are filled with characters who employ lucky charms and superstitions. And some works explore the , when ritual spills into obsession and .

Surprisingly, though, there has been little effort to examine rituals quantitatively. A slated for publication in the journal Psychological Science attempts to rectify that: Harvard Business School researcher Francesca Gino and colleagues focused on the way rituals influenced adults’ experience of eating.

People who employed rituals before eating savored their food more and found it tastier, the researchers discovered. That was true for chocolate and even carrots. Steve Inskeep and I explore why that might be true on Thursday’s Morning Edition.